jerseyhoya wrote:Bush would have won regardless of what the Supreme Court decided.

jerseyhoya wrote:Bush would have won regardless of what the Supreme Court decided.

It turns out that’s not what the email said. To quiet the growing furor over the idea that the White House had thumbed the scale on the State Department’s behalf, a government official subsequently leaked to CNN the full text of Rhodes’ message, which was assiduously neutral about each relevant agency’s concerns.

But discussions with several people in attendance at or with knowledge of the two congressional briefings suggest that members and staffers were left with the opposite impression — that the White House had remained neutral in the dispute between the State Department and the CIA — and that after a thorough run-through, they were given ample time to take notes not just about the briefing itself, but in theory to transcribe key emails verbatim.

“When I say they were allowed to have the documents for as long as they wanted, they were allowed to take notes for as long as they wanted as well,” the intelligence official said.

The discrepancy between the documents ABC was provided and the official records has led White House officials, congressional aides, and outside observers to the conclusion that a GOP member or staffer falsified notes or tendentiously interpreted administration emails — and then leaked them — to create the impression that the White House had sided with the State Department in an intra-agency dispute to protect President Obama from political blowback.

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After those briefings, the Benghazi controversy quieted down for several weeks — a tellingly long silence given how damning the emails supposedly were — until ABC’s report, including its characterization of the White House’s involvement, exploded in the press late last week. Karl, who downplayed the discrepancies between the summaries he relied on and the actual emails, was not immediately available for comment for this story.

“I wouldn’t go into what the members said in the meeting,” the intelligence official said. “The relationship between what the documents show and what the report said sort of speak for itself.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has subpoenaed the co-chairman of the independent review board that investigated last year’s attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, to answer questions about the panel’s findings behind closed doors.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement Friday that he had issued the subpoena to retired veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering to force him to appear at a deposition next week. Pickering, who co-chaired the Benghazi Accountability Review Board with a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chief Mike Mullen, has offered to testify before Issa’s committee in public. But Issa said a closed-door meeting is needed first in order for the committee to fully understand how the review board conducted its investigation.

The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department, and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday.